Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss (top ten ebook reader TXT) 📕

He offers his elbow as they cross the road, where the first open carriages of the season jostle among the hansom cabs and carts. She finds that she has taken his arm, and also that she feels no objection when he does not release her as they enter the park. The plane trees have come into full leaf since she last thought about them, a rich blue-green too dense to paint in water-colour, and ducklings hurry behind their mothers around the fountains in the square pond.

He tucks her hand against his coat. ‘This time last year, I was holding onto the rocks to stop myself blowing into the North Sea. I suppose there were tulips here then too.’

She tries to remember. April. The fever ward. ‘I cannot say. I am sure I did go outdoors by daylight but the experience has left no impression.’

He does not reply. Perhaps she sounded repressive. ‘You were building a lighthouse?’ she asks.

His hair is even brighter in the sun, a metallic, inorganic colour. Copper, she thinks, more than bronze. ‘Unbuilding, this time. A strange place. The sea is in retreat, and the land so low that the channels shift from one year to the next. There had been a tower there for three hundred years, perhaps as much of a mark for those travelling by land as by sea, for in those parts the fields are flatter than the water. But there was a navigable channel when Richard Penvenick was first commissioned to put in a new light twenty years ago, and two years after that there was a great storm. Even the greatest towers, you know, can be moved by the waves, but on this occasion it was not the building but the water that moved. On the morning after the storm, the channel was no more than a trickle through the sand, something a boy could cross without wetting his short trousers. We waited, of course, to see if the whim that moved the water would return it, but after maintaining a redundant light for eighteen years Mr. Penvennick sent me to remove the mechanism and lens.’

A child in a blue dress and white pinafore runs across their path, pursued by a smaller child in a sailor suit much impeded by a fit of giggles.

‘I have always thought of the coast as static. As it is on a map. But of course it is not.’

‘No. Quite apart from the movement of the land, the falls of the cliffs on the south coast and the shifting sands to the east, the tides are always in motion. I should say that the nation gains and loses some dozens of square miles of sand and rock with each revolution of the planet.’

Her steps check, as though dizzied by his extra-terrestrial vantage-point. She sees the Earth in its stately waltz through dark and light, each landmass expanding and contracting as though breathing.

‘But your lighthouses stand firm.’

He turns to smile, a slight pressure on her arm. ‘We hope so. It is my job, our jobs, to make sure that they do. But it is a constant battle against wind and sea, fought at least as much by mathematics and physics at Mr. Penvenick’s desk in Falmouth as by stone and mortar on the shore. We do not always win. Mr. Penvenick encourages us to believe that failure is as useful to our science as success, but that is an old man’s philosophy.’ He frowns, looses her arm. ‘I cannot say that I have learnt to love my mistakes.’

She wants to take off her gloves, feel his tweed sleeve under her bare hands. ‘The same is said of surgery. And that most of those who die on the operating table are saved from a slower and more painful end. But there are lives in our hands. As in yours.’

More lives, in some ways, in his, since ships carry many hundreds of souls. She sees again May’s hair rippling like weeds in the water. Her hair would have come unpinned, surely, in the waves.

His other hand pats hers. ‘We are too solemn for this bright day. Tell me, Miss Moberley, shall you take a holiday this summer? Celebrate your graduation? Or will you be returning to your family?’

The cold breath of the hall at home yawns around her. ‘I hope to find work, and will go where it takes me. It is still difficult for a woman, you know, in private practice, and few hospitals welcome us. There may be an opening here. I am not eager to return to my parents.’

She thinks of her best friend, her only friend, Annie, who wants to go on living with her cheerful family in their cheerful home. She chose long ago to love Annie too much to be envious; different people have different paths through life, that’s all. Ally feels, when she thinks of the summer, of the future opening before her, like a fledgling. After a certain age, most of them can land well enough. It is taking off again that is the problem. She pauses.

‘I will be returning to Cornwall,’ he says. ‘Mr. Penvenick has just won a new colonial contract. He did not communicate the details but he wants me to assist him with a new set of designs. I have hopes—well, he is sixty-five. And his son is a railway engineer who shows no interest in the lights.’

‘Oh.’ Something else that is changing. She should not have allowed herself to come to depend on his calls, which have bejewelled her winter’s work. He comes, probably, mostly for George’s sake.

‘But I do not leave for another month. So we must make the most of the springtime, must we not?’

He meets her gaze. She blushes, and then blushes again for the blushing of a spinster and a professional woman, a woman who made an open-eyed decision to have a career, to be unentangled, single in vision. He nods, and